Just Installed Ubuntu Mate 15.10 on a machine I picked up at the local recycler. It is one of those small form factors with an i5 quad core, 4 gigs of RAM and 320 gb hd. I gotta say, I have found my Mint replacement. One of the things I like about this distro is that you can make the GUI more mac-like (including a dock) or Windows-like with the menu on the bottom of the screen or you can go with the out of the box package with the Mate install. I will get some pics up later this week when I come up for air on Thursday.

I've decided to upgrade my computer and in the next week or so I plan to order a Chimpbox which is a little smaller then your Dell. It has no fan's so not having the fan noise will certainly be different. I'll probably make my old computer a backup file server.

Looks like you are having fun with Ubuntu. I really like Mate and I currently have the PCLOS version installed.

This has nothing to do with Ubuntu Mate but it does with the little system it is installed on. I picked up 16GB of DDR3 from Newegg for under $60 so the machine will get a bet of an upgrade. I will report in on the results of the upgrade. I am sure the entire OS could run in RAM if needed. Why upgrade? Because I can

Glad you tryed it. I love mine. Just reinstalled though to set my /Home folder on another partition so I can play with the OS and not lose my stuff.

I had a crash and this was a good time to relocate my /Home folder. All was backed up before :-)

Ducky; I don't know if this has been done before or not but it would seem to me that it would work. Since the /Home folder is on a separate partition then if HDD was broken up into several small partitions, I don't see why several distro's could not be installed and all of them access the same /Home folder. I'm not sure why someone would want to do that, it would seem you are putting your data at risk to experiment with a distro.

I still think the best way to check out a distro and see if you like it is to install it on an older machine that it's sole purpose in life is to experiment with. That way if things go south, and eventually they will, you haven't lost anything and can move on to the next experiment.

I backup to external drives so I have my stuff yet. The way I put the /Home folder on a separate partition I am now able to reinstall OSs with out losing anything in the Home folder. We just do not want to format this partition when we install the OS on it partition.

I backup to external drives so I have my stuff yet. The way I put the /Home folder on a separate partition I am now able to reinstall OSs with out losing anything in the Home folder. We just do not want to format this partition when we install the OS on it partition.

At least that is the way I understand it.

That is correct. Down the road you may want to try one of the Rolling Release Distro's then you will not have to worry about having to up date your OS to the next release version.

Tossed this on another machine today as a "mental break" between all of the stuff going on in preparation for Easter. The machine in question is a box I had been running "Cloudready" on in my garage. I upgraded it with a 64 GB Crucial SSD before the install. It went smooth and without hiccups. Rebooted and ran the update without problems. It seems Ubuntu Mate is pretty light on resources.

I updated the processor in the AMD machine in the garage from the Athlon II 4850e to a Phenom x4 9150e (both 45 watt) and installed a better heatsink while it was apart. Ubuntu Mate booted without a hitch and works great with the Phenom processor. I also found a 1 gb stick of ram and removed the 512 stick for a total of 3 GBs of DDR2.